How Adobe uses its own technology to run its business

Hi. I’m Chris Mayo, leader of the Adobe@Adobe Program. We are a small development team within IT formed in March 2008, founded by and reporting to our CIO, Gerri Martin-Flickinger. Our charter is to create innovative enterprise solutions that showcase emergent Adobe technologies in addition to developing new opportunities for revenue growth and process improvement.

While the idea of software companies ‘drinking their own champagne’ is not particularly new or original, the goal of Adobe@Adobe takes this to a new level of innovation. The solutions we create are completely new and not merely mainstream IT implementations of boxed product. Our solutions are often created by combining Adobe products in ways never done before.

The team plays a strategic role at Adobe by engaging with and bringing together IT, Sales and Product Engineering in a symbiotic way. We promote product excellence by providing feedback to Engineering early in the development cycle – typically pre-release – in a complex enterprise environment. The solutions we build address practical needs of the business often providing a service previously nonexistent or unavailable as a comprehensive, single solution. Our solutions are leveraged by Sales in demonstrating the depth and breadth achievable by Adobe software in the enterprise.

The success the team has met in our first year has exceeded all our expectations. We have have built some fantastic and compelling solutions that will be covered in depth by the team in future posts. We have established ourselves as a trusted, valuable and active partner in the product development cycle and participated in dozens of critical sales presentations to some of our largest and most valuable customers. To say nothing of the new projects underway or on the drawing board.

I encourage you visit this blog regularly as we share our successes, challenges and insight (including code samples) on the future of Adobe in the Enterprise.